Rushton’s whole body trembled.
‘Her clothes were stained with urine and faecal matter,’ said Brown, who’d been tasked with collating the evidence from the casket that wasn’t Patsy herself. ‘Also vomit. Again suggesting that she was interred alive.’
I was looking at the sycamore tree again.
‘We know she was alive,’ Tom said. ‘She’d half wrecked the coffin trying to claw her way out.’
I think everyone in the room, except the pathologist, reacted to that. We’d all seen the casket in the early hours of the morning. We’d all seen the torn, blood-stained satin, the vomit in the hair of the dead man whose peaceful resting place it was supposed to have been. Poor Patsy had been laid directly on top of a corpse. She would have been terrified. He’d deserved better too. I tried to remember his name. Douglas, I thought. Douglas Simmonds.
The pathologist frowned. ‘What’s a little more puzzling is that I can’t see any sign of her being restrained.’
‘How do you mean?’ Rushton asked.
‘No obvious bruises around her shoulders or neck.’ The pathologist crossed to a nearby worktop and re-angled a lamp to shine more brightly on Patsy’s upper body. ‘We know her wrists and ankles weren’t bound. So the question you gentlemen should be asking is how someone managed to get her in there.’
‘Might she have been drugged?’ I suggested. ‘Chloroform maybe? Any of the anaesthetising drugs?’
One of the others, Sharples I think, exhaled.
Dodds waited a good five seconds before responding. ‘The tissue analysis may tell us that. Although the anaesthetising drugs are not commonly available.’
‘When did she die?’ Rushton asked. ‘Can you give us a time of death, doctor?’
My eyes were back up on the sycamore tree.
‘Hmmn, rigor mortis has passed; livor mortis has had chance to develop on her back and buttocks. I’d say death occurred sometime in the hours of Monday night through to Tuesday morning.’ He looked up at us. ‘Some time before you were called out to the churchyard yesterday evening.’
I heard several sighs of relief in the room. One of them, I’m sure, being my own. Rushton, though, merely closed his eyes again. We gave him the moment he seemed to need, and watched threads of colour sneaking back into his face. Meanwhile, Dodds had opened Patsy’s mouth with a metal instrument and was shining a small torch inside.
‘Interesting,’ he said.
The rest of us looked at each other. Waited.
‘She appears to have had a tooth removed recently,’ Dodds said. ‘Top right canine. Bit of a clumsy extraction. You might want to check with her dentist.’
Brown seemed to start. He shot a glance at the boss and opened his mouth.
‘Any sign she’d been interfered with?’ Sharples asked.
Brown frowned and closed his mouth again as Dodds moved down Patsy’s body.
I wasn’t about to watch this bit. I kept my eyes down, this time, on the floor tiles, which were the colour of buttermilk, on the grime-stained grouting between them, on the large central drain. I heard the sound of dead flesh being slid over marble, of instruments plonking down onto hard surfaces. No one spoke.
‘Hard to say at this stage,’ Dodds said.
I glanced up and then straight back down again. Dodds had pulled some sort of upside-down stirrups from beneath the table and Patsy’s thin white legs were pinned in each of them.
‘I can’t see any sign of bleeding here specifically,’ Dodds went on. ‘And no obvious bruising or tearing.’ He grunted, in the way people do as they’re bending over or getting up from a low seat. ‘Hymen doesn’t seem to be intact,’ he said, ‘but that in itself doesn’t prove anything, given what kids are these days. Examining her clothes might give you more idea, but for now I’d say not likely.’
Several more sighs sounded around the room as Dodds removed the stirrups and lowered Patsy’s legs.
‘Well, I’m about to start the internal examination,’ the pathologist said. ‘Which you’re welcome to stay around for, if you’d like?’ He crossed to the worktop and picked up a scalpel.
We didn’t like. We thanked him and left the room. Thirty minutes later, the men were in the meeting room next to Rushton’s office. I was in the kitchen. Making tea.
23
Rushton had a secretary who usually made tea for her boss’s meetings, but she didn’t look up as I carried the laden tray past her desk. Nor did she help me open the door to the meeting room. Inside, the men were on their feet.
‘I’ll get a couple of the lads talking to the funeral directors in the area,’ Green was saying. ‘Get a list of burials since Susan went missing. We can visit the graves discreetly, see if any look likely.’
‘I think you need to go back a bit further,’ said Brown. ‘If someone’s hiding corpses in graves, they won’t necessarily go for the most recent ones.’
‘But ground hardens up after a while,’ I said. ‘The newer graves will be easier to dig.’
Silence. I put down the tray.
‘We bow to your greater experience,’ said the super. ‘Maybe go back to the start of the year, Gusty. There can’t be that many. We haven’t had a pestilence.’
I stayed where I was, leaning awkwardly over the table, unsure whether I was expected to serve the tea or leave. Tom gave me a tight-lipped smile.
‘Right.’ Rushton pulled out a chair at the head of the table. ‘Sit down, gents. I’ve something to say to WPC Lovelady.’ The super was looking directly at me; I could feel my face glowing purple. The noise of scraping chairs subsided.
‘I’m glad you did it, Florence,’ he said. ‘It showed a lot of neck, and it gave us a result, if not the one we wanted.’
A couple of the others muttered agreement. Sharples looked at me with a cold, flinty stare.
‘On the other hand, next time you pull a stunt like that, you could find yourself up shit creek, and I won’t be handing out paddles.’ Rushton leaned across the table towards me. ‘I want my officers sticking to the rules and putting themselves first, not going out on a limb following hunches that could get them, and me, in the doo-doo. Do I make myself clear, love?’
‘Perfectly, sir. I’m sorry,’ I said.
Rushton leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. ‘And while I’m on the subject,’ he went on, ‘I could have something to say to officers who should know better being led by a pretty face into reckless midnight shenanigans. But I’ll leave that to your individual consciences.’
Silence round the table. Making an effort not to look at Tom, I took a step backwards towards the door.
‘The second thing, Flossie,’ said Rushton, ‘is I want you off the beat and moving upstairs for the foreseeable. I’ll have someone bring up a desk for you.’
‘Do you mind me asking why, boss?’ Sharples looked like he’d sucked on an unripe lemon. ‘We need bobbies on the beat right now. Even if they’re … well.’
‘I want a small team at the centre of this investigation and Flossie has barged her way into it,’ Rushton said. ‘Besides, we’re going to need a lot of stuff typing up quickly and I don’t want it going through the typing pool. Better switch to plain clothes too, Flossie. There might be times in the next few weeks when I don’t want it blindingly obvious that you’re a police officer.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I managed, with an uncomfortable feeling that I hadn’t exactly earned this co-option to the team, that Rushton just wanted to keep an eye on me. There was also the problem that I couldn’t actually—
‘And we’re going to need a regular supply of tea,’ Brown said. ‘Milk, two sugars, please, Flossie.’
I picked up the pot, keeping my eyes down. If I kept quiet and made myself useful, they might not kick me out.
‘Right, now we’ve got Flossie sorted, this is even more important,’ said Rushton. ‘I want no mention of the words “buried alive” outside this group. In fact, I don’t even want any of you saying them out loud, not until we know w
hat we’re dealing with.’
I looked up. ‘But, sir, we can’t—’ I stopped. Me and my big mouth. Sharples was openly sneering.
‘What’s on your mind, Florence?’ the super said.
‘It will have to come out at the inquest,’ I said.
‘It will, but that will be days away, if not a couple of weeks. We’ve got some breathing space.’
‘The case has a lot of attention, though,’ said Green. ‘Thanks to Flossie’s TV reconstruction. People can hardly get through the front door this morning for hacks and local do-gooders. We’re going to have a lot of tough questions.’
‘We issue a statement this morning,’ Rushton said. ‘Flossie, you’re good with words: you can type it out. Patsy Wood was found in a newly dug grave that showed signs of having been interfered with. Don’t mention you did the interfering. No other comment will be made until after the inquest. Blah de blah, blah. You can make something up, sound impressive.’
I couldn’t type. I’d been to university, not secretarial school.
‘We still have two missing teenagers,’ Rushton went on, ‘and if it gets out they might have been buried alive, we’ll have a mob with pitchforks on every street corner and every grave from here to Burnley desecrated. We need to find them first. What is it now, Flossie?’
I’d been handing Detective Sergeant Brown his tea when something had occurred to me. Hiding my thoughts was obviously something I had to work on.
‘Sorry, sir,’ I said. ‘It’s just that when the pathologist told us about Patsy’s missing tooth, DS Brown looked as though he was about to say something.’
Brown didn’t look thrilled at my singling him out.
‘Anything to share, Woodsmoke?’ Rushton asked.
‘Not really,’ Brown said. ‘But I was brought up in these parts and my gran was always a one for the old stories. Scared us half to death at times. Witches were her favourites. She used to talk about spells they did, black magic, that sort of thing. Said they dug up graves to get body parts.’
Sharples said, ‘I don’t quite—’
‘And she were right about that,’ Brown interrupted. ‘It was documented at the Pendle witch trial back in 16 – whenever. Local magistrate was called out one Sunday because graves had been dug up in one of the churches in the forest. Recent graves and all. People arrived at church to see dead family members littered about.’ He looked around at us. ‘I’m not telling ghost stories; this is history.’
‘Sounds like a pretty nasty piece of intimidation to me,’ Rushton said.
‘Except, according to Gran, it wasn’t only about upsetting people,’ said Brown. ‘She said the witches needed body parts to make their spells work.’
‘Lovely,’ said Sharples. ‘That’s enough milk, Lovelady. I haven’t got a calcium deficiency.’
‘Hair and fingernails are good, but blood, teeth and bone are better,’ Brown went on. ‘You can look as sceptical as you like, boss, but my gran always made sure she threw nail clippings and stray hair on the fire so they wouldn’t fall into witches’ hands. A lot of her generation did.’
There was a knock on the door and the super’s secretary poked her head into the room. ‘Evidence want a word, sir,’ she told the super. ‘Urgent.’
‘We also need to go back over the first two disappearances.’ Rushton got up. ‘Talk to their school again, their friends, find out what we missed. Flossie, you’re the closest thing we’ve got to a schoolkid: you’re in charge of that. We probably need to sort out use of a car for you.’
The door closed behind the super.
‘Can you actually drive, Lovelady?’ asked Sharples.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘I got my licence when I was seventeen.’
The super came back. He’d lost colour.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘The lot of you. Evidence want us right away. They’ve found something in the coffin.’
24
The small female figure that had been found in the casket along with Patsy was grotesque. Just over six inches long, made from some sort of reddish-brown clay, its feet and hands were bound together behind its back. Thin slivers of wood, thirteen of them – I counted quickly – pierced the hands and feet, eyes, ears and mouth, genitals and anus, top of the head and middle of the chest.
‘Bloody Norah,’ Sharples said.
It was revolting, but none of us could look away. Hair fell to its shoulders and was held back by a thin band. The facial features were tiny but perfectly formed. The face had even been made thin around the temples with a high forehead. There was something slightly strange about its mouth, but other than that—
‘It looks like Patsy.’ I moved away, further round the table. I didn’t want to be anywhere near the thing.
‘Where’d you find it?’ Rushton asked.
The two officers in charge of evidence handling had stepped back to let the six of us get to the examination table. ‘Tucked under the satin,’ one of them said. ‘We only found it when we cut it all loose.’
The casket we’d found Patsy in was here too, taking up too much space in this small, cramped room. I had no idea where the body of Douglas Simmonds had been taken and it didn’t seem like the moment to ask.
‘It’s a voodoo doll,’ said Brown.
‘Those aren’t pins,’ Green said quickly. ‘They look like bits of wood to me. Voodoo dolls have pins.’
Brown squatted down to bring himself on a level with the tabletop. ‘There’s something in its mouth. Stuck in, I mean, like when it was – what do they call it, fired? It looks like a tooth, boss.’
Tom and Green joined him.
Patsy’s missing canine. We were all thinking it.
‘Woodsmoke,’ said the super, whose colour had left him again. ‘Can you check with Patsy’s dentist, soon as you can? See if he took her tooth out. I’m not liking this, I’m really not.’
We all started at the knock on the door. Sharples threw a cloth over the figure a second before one of the secretaries opened the door and asked for Rushton.
After he left, no one uncovered the figure. None of us seemed to know what to say. I walked to the other end of the table, where Patsy’s clothes were laid out: red cardigan, flower-print dress, socks, knickers, vest and shoes.
‘Do these look unusually clean to anyone?’ I said.
‘No,’ answered Brown, before giving a quick sideways glance at the others. They were still gathered round the hidden figure.
‘I’m not talking about the blood and vomit,’ I said. ‘I’m talking about what’s not here. I can’t see any soil stains. If she was put in the grave after the official burial, there’d be traces of soil at least. Her clothes shouldn’t be this clean.’
I stopped talking, because no one was listening to me. The door opened and the super was back. ‘We’ve Roy Greenwood and Larry Glassbrook downstairs,’ he said. ‘Wanting to make a statement.’
Sharples seemed to brace himself before reaching down and uncovering the clay figure. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘We can ask them if they’ve seen this before.’
The figure, the likeness of Patsy, lay naked on the wooden table, her sightless eyes staring at me.
25
‘Florence can interview them,’ said the super.
‘All due respect, sir, we can’t send a fresh WPC to interview suspects,’ said Sharples. ‘I should do it.’
‘They’re not suspects,’ said Rushton. ‘They’ve come in voluntarily to make a statement and you’ll scare ‘em. Butter ‘em up, Flossie. They won’t be on their guard with you. Go in with her, Tom. Act a bit daft. You know, your usual approach.’
The two undertakers were shown into the interview room, the one with the two-way mirror, and Tom joined them first to thank them for coming. I followed a couple of minutes later, with a another tea tray, a pencil and a notepad. When I opened the door, the smell of men’s toiletries came flooding out. Tom wore Brut 33, rather more of it than I cared for, and I was familiar with Larry’s Old Spice. The other scent in
the air, a cloying, greasy smell, I guessed was the oil on Greenwood’s hair.
‘We’re here to express our concern about what happened at St Wilfred’s in the early hours of this morning,’ said Roy Greenwood, after Tom had asked what he could do for ‘you two gents’.
Roy Greenwood’s teeth were perfect, with the startling whiteness of dentures, but he had a habit of pulling his upper lip over them when he wasn’t speaking, as though they didn’t fit too well. His eyes, deep set in his head, were a dull brown, while his face and hands had a pallor that seemed to sit well with his profession. Beside him, Larry looked like a rock star.
‘We want to say that it’s shocked us as much as anyone,’ Greenwood went on, ‘and that we will do whatever we can to help the police investigation.’
‘Good of you,’ Tom said, as I poured tea into three cups.
‘We’ve been serving this town for nearly twenty years,’ Greenwood said, ‘and we are disquieted that our respectable establishment should have become embroiled in so heinous a crime.’
I didn’t think I’d ever heard the word ‘heinous’ used in real life before.
‘Anything you want to add, Mr Glassbrook?’ Tom asked Larry.
Larry shook his head. ‘Roy does the talking for both of us.’ He waggled his fingers. ‘I talk with my hands.’
‘Who has keys to the funeral parlour?’ Tom asked, once I’d added milk and offered both visitors sugar.
‘The two of us,’ Greenwood replied.
‘And Sally,’ Larry added.
Greenwood’s head turned sideways. ‘Sally has keys? To the parlour?’
Larry shrugged. ‘In case I lose mine.’ Greenwood’s nostrils twitched.
‘I’ll make a note to check that Mrs Glassbrook hasn’t mislaid her keys.’ I took a seat at the far end of the table. ‘Would either of you like a biscuit?’
‘I think you said yesterday that the parlour was locked once you left for the evening on Sunday?’ Tom said.
‘I locked it myself,’ Greenwood said. ‘There are human remains in our parlour. We cannot allow them to be interfered with.’ He smiled at Tom, a smile so wide and uncalled for I had to suppress a shudder.
The Craftsman Page 9
